by Craig Dirkes
“With me,” I said. “My boss paid to fly it here.”
“Is he paying to fly it out?”
“Yes, after my year is up.”
Another mistake. I should have said “yes” without adding more. But I was too rattled, and still too tired, to forecast the implications of my words.
Then, after another one of his silent pauses, my dad said, “I’m proud of you.”
“What?”
“I said I’m proud of you, Eddie. You’ve taken responsibility for your mistake. In the process, you’ve gained valuable experience.”
I let his words sink in. “You’re not mad I flunked out of college?”
“Of course I’m mad. And I’m even madder that you lied about it. Incidentally, you’re a bad liar. You mentioned Kusko Dry Goods during our Father’s Day conversation too.”
In the background, Max shouted, “Dumbass!”
“Sorry about that, Dad. Really, I am. The truth is that I’ve been in over my head ever since I moved to Alaska. It’s brutal being so far from home on my own.”
“I know it is, but you’re figuring it out. Through your mistakes, you’re learning to do the right thing. Your mother would be proud.”
I patted the package of weed lodged in my butt crack. No, she wouldn’t, I thought.
“Thanks,” I said. “I really do need to get going.”
“Let’s talk again soon.”
“Love you, Pops. Have fun fishing.” I stood up from the kitchen table and shoved my phone back into my front pocket. Finn bolted from the couch to the kitchen and grabbed my backpack.
“I’ll put this in your truck,” he said, hoisting the backpack onto his shoulder. “If we don’t leave this second, you won’t make it. You can feel guilty about your daddy talk later.”
Finn scurried out the door. I still hadn’t taken a step. I stood frozen, reflecting on the conversation I’d just had.
You’re figuring it out, my dad had told me. You’re learning to do the right thing.
I envisioned my mom looking down on me from above. I wanted her to be proud of me. Between selling weed and smoking weed and ditching out on Dalton and pounding beers every day in college and failing my classes and lying to people to cover up my misdeeds and being pissed off all the time over a situation I created, I was sure the Alaskan version of me would not make her proud.
At that moment, everything I wanted, and everything I’d worked for, was laid out before me on a platter — college, my friends in Anchorage, mountains, fast food at two a.m., movie theaters, car washes, department stores, freedom from Sucktown. All of it was there. All I had to do was sell one more ounce of weed.
I walked outside and stopped myself near the hood of the FJ. Finn had already started the vehicle. He sat in the passenger seat of the truck as it idled. I opened the driver’s side door, got in, and sat down on the black vinyl seat. I grabbed hold of the key in the ignition and took a giant breath. I twisted the key, forty-five degrees counterclockwise.
“You’re shitting me,” Finn said.
CHAPTER 21
STILL IN SUCKTOWN
When I was nine years old and new homes were being built in my neighborhood, my friends and I would sneak into the attics of the half-built houses and jump around on the pink fluffy stuff. Later, around the time I’d go home for lunch, a slow burn would heat up in my hands, arms, and legs. By nightfall, the microscopic shards of fiberglass in my pores would ignite into an itchy inferno. The pain would blaze until I ate my corn flakes the next morning. Then, the next day, I’d do it all over again.
I’d forgotten all about the itch and burn until I helped Nicolai Vawter insulate homes in Napakiak, a three-hundred-person village ten miles southwest of Kusko. My forearms already started to tingle as we worked. I’d left them exposed between my utility gloves and the rolled-up sleeves of my sweatshirt. I knew from experience that once I fell asleep that night, I’d scratch those areas of skin until they were raw.
“Son of a —” I said, cutting myself off when I glanced at Nicolai, the pastor, standing right next to me.
“When you get back to Kusko, mix baking soda with water and spread the paste onto where it itches,” he said. “Keep it there for a half hour. After that it’ll feel better.”
Napakiak was linked to Kusko not only via the river, but by an old trail that postal workers from the early- to mid-1900s traveled, via dogsled, to deliver the mail. During winter, the trail shaved several miles off the journey to and from Kusko for mushers and snow-machiners who’d otherwise have to travel the frozen Kuskokwim. Saving those few miles was a godsend for people who needed to get to Kusko in sub-zero temperatures for emergency supplies, medical attention, or a greasy burger at Delta Delicious.
The trail was the same one that connected to the mushing trail that started in Dalton’s backyard.
Nicolai and I wore dirty work jeans and disposable white dust masks. We fit the insulation ahead of two other church volunteers — a Native father named Willie, and his son, Willie Jr. — who covered the walls with Sheetrock behind us. They ran a construction outfit in Kusko. Our goal was to insulate three homes that Saturday.
Nicolai, the Willies, and other church volunteers had spent the past two months erecting the three homes, working on the weekends. Each house was the same: an efficiency space with room for two bunk beds, plus a small kitchen area. None of the homes had enough room for a couch; the families would need to watch TV from their beds or from their kitchen tables. No plumbing work was needed — the families would use drums of water for drinking, cooking, and cleaning pots. Behind the houses, Nicolai and company had built a steam bath for the families to share. For toilets, they’d use honey buckets or the great outdoors.
I had arrived with Nicolai and the Willies aboard two wooden skiffs powered by forty-horse outboards. Each skiff was stacked high with construction materials. It was late October, and winter was coming up fast. More than two months had passed since the day I bailed on my last delivery, the one that would’ve put me over the top. After talking to my dad and finding out he knew the truth about my situation, I’d been keeping my commitments in Kusko.
Nicolai told me this week would be the last that anybody could travel the Kuskokwim by boat. In five or six weeks, the river would become a frozen interstate for trucks and snow machines. Ice had already begun to form along areas of the shoreline.
“Two houses down, one to go,” Nicolai said, stapling the final strip of insulation inside the second home. He’d funded the construction of the homes with a share of the summer’s church offerings. Nicolai put on his jacket. “Let’s take five before we start on the third.”
I put on my red hunting coat and followed him outside. As Nicolai headed toward the river to get more insulation from one of the skiffs, I circled around the back of the house to take a squirt. It was dong-shriveling cold outside, windy, and getting dark. I unzipped my jeans and did my business, pointing my stream downwind into some weeds.
Napakiak must have been the blandest, most boring village I’d visited in the YK Delta. It was nothing more than a wide dirt road lined with ramshackle homes on stilts. Spruce trees, abutting a universe of tundra, surrounded the homes and road.
I was whizzing away when I heard commotion to my left. Two houses down, a short, thirty-something white guy wearing tan coveralls tried to light a cigarette. He swayed like a tall tree in high wind.
“You’ve got it backward!” I shouted.
“What?” he asked, looking in my general direction, adjusting his red stocking cap.
“Flip your smoke around — you’re lighting the filter.”
“Oh shit,” he muttered.
He lit his smoke just as I finished peeing. He started talking again before I could zip up and walk away.
“Hey, kid,” he grumbled, stumbling in my direction. “You holding?”
�
�Sorry, brother. I got nothing,” I said, watching him come closer.
“Then you fuckin’ suck, dude,” he said, coming up to me and exhaling a puff of smoke.
The insult didn’t faze me. Like many village guys, he was a hard-ass. If I didn’t return fire, I’d lose his respect. If I lost his respect, he’d start messing with me. I’d been in the YK Delta long enough to know how these guys operated.
“Whatever, cockrocket,” I said, choosing an extra-strong insult and taking a step toward him to signify I wasn’t afraid. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”
He blurted a drunken chuckle. He took off the leather glove on his right hand and extended his arm. “I’m Cal.”
“Eddie,” I said, taking off my utility glove to shake back. “What do you need, Cal?”
“I need a lot of weed is what I need,” he said. “Been dry here for a while. Napakiak is the last stop on our supplier’s run. Sometimes he sells out before he gets here.”
“Want me to throw a line out when I get back to Kusko? I know people.”
I was just saying that. I didn’t want anything to do with this guy. Not to mention, I was done selling weed. Forever. I was trying to straighten out my act, to live so I didn’t have anything to hide, and I’d been helping out Nicolai to try to even the scales in my mind after all the bad shit I’d done in Alaska.
“Nah,” Cal replied, stumbling a bit. “You don’t need to ask around. That’d be a mistake.”
* * *
I walked up the wooden steps to the third house and swung the door open. I found Nicolai inside, unraveling a roll of pink insulation. I stepped aside as the two Willies carried in Sheetrock.
“Let’s get back to work, Eddie,” Nicolai said, handing me a stapler. “I want to get back to Kusko at a decent hour.”
As I took the stapler and checked to see if I needed to reload, I found myself still thinking about my encounter with Cal. Being in the presence of His Holiness, Nicolai, always kindled my conscience. I thought about when I’d sold weed all those times, about how by selling weed I’d enabled people like Cal. I imagined his story probably went something like this: His parents didn’t know how to parent, so he sucked in school. By sucking in school, he didn’t learn the basics, and without the basics, he couldn’t land a decent job. Without a good job, he was poor. In being poor, he was pissed that he couldn’t make a good life for himself. In being pissed, he needed something to take his mind off how shitty his life was. To take his mind off things, he smoked weed and got hammered. By smoking weed and getting hammered all the time, his life got shittier.
“You okay?” Nicolai asked me.
I was so spellbound by what I believed to be Cal’s tragic life that I still hadn’t moved while Nicolai had gotten back to action. “Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, eyeing the stapler in my hand.
“You want to talk about something?” he asked.
We got back to work, and as I did, I told Nicolai about meeting Cal outside and everything I assumed to be true about the guy.
“That’s a fair assessment,” Nicolai finally said from atop his ladder as he rolled a strip of insulation down the wall. “But don’t go thinking it’s just poor people who smoke marijuana and drink too much alcohol.”
Here we go. Nicolai was going to tell me not to be so closed-minded, because there were still plenty of functional drunks and junkies out there, like suburban car salesman dads who swilled vodka in the garage after their families went to bed, and lonely housewives who started drinking red wine earlier and earlier in the day the more depressed they became. My dad, the bartender, had already filled me in.
But Nicolai said, “I’m living proof that addiction doesn’t discriminate.”
I continued stapling, pretending I wasn’t nearly as interested as I actually was to hear the dirt on him. He started telling me how he grew up in a good family, that he married a good woman. He supported her by working construction in villages along the Yukon River.
“Then life happened — we had a kid, I lost my job,” Nicolai said. “One night, I took a drink to take the edge off.”
The two Willies walked outside to grab more Sheetrock from the skiffs.
After they shut the door, Nicolai continued. “It snowballed from there. I got fired from construction job after construction job. My wife stuck with me for the sake of our son.”
Nicolai explained how he got so bad that he once traded his snow machine for three cases of beer and two ounces of weed. I stopped looking at him and stared at the floor. The conversation was getting too intense. I turned around to fit more insulation.
“That’s crazy,” I said, sounding insincere.
When I looked up, Nicolai had his arms folded, like he was scolding me. Dust coated his face except where his mask had covered his nose and mouth.
“You need to take this seriously,” he said. “It creeps up on you, Eddie. It’s a thief that steals little bits of your life. You don’t know it’s happening when it’s happening. Then, one day, everything you had is gone.”
“Why are you getting worked up, Nicolai?” I asked. “Just because you couldn’t handle yourself doesn’t mean I can’t. I don’t even party anymore. I learned my lesson in college.”
“I’m not a fool,” he replied. “You’re at a dangerous age right now. You think you know everything, but in reality, you’re always one impulse away from doing something monumentally stupid.”
“Thanks for the talk,” I said.
Nicolai shook his head and sighed, frustrated that I was brushing off a subject so personal to him. I felt bad that I’d offended him. I figured that a happy follow-up question would patch things up. “How did you go from where you were to becoming a pastor?”
Willie Jr. opened the door, clad in camo coveralls. A muscular guy not much older than me, he had short hair and bushy black sideburns.
“Pick up the pace, gentlemen,” he said. “It’s getting cold out there. We need to get back to town.”
* * *
Nicolai, the Willies, and I landed the skiffs at the Kusko boat launch. It was dark outside and hard to see much of anything. The instant my and Nicolai’s skiff touched the sandy shoreline, I jumped off the front and darted toward the FJ, which was parked near a Dumpster. I ran at record speed, like I was trying to escape gunfire on the beaches of Normandy.
“Eddie!” Nicolai hollered after I was halfway to the truck. “Aren’t you going to help us unload?”
“Can’t talk, gotta poop!” I yelled back from under the yellow light of a lamppost, kicking up rooster tails of sand behind me. “Sorry!”
I didn’t really have to poop, though. I just wanted to see Taylor, and less than five minutes later, I pulled up to her house and flipped off my headlights. It was just before seven o’clock.
I knocked on Taylor’s door, and she opened it. I fell backward, pretending like I’d been knocked over by a hurricane. “Holy smokes, Taylor — your hotness just blew me away!”
“You’re a dork,” she said. She wore black yoga pants and a gray sweatshirt. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail. “Get inside, you. It’s cold out here.”
Lately I often gave Taylor shit about being hot. Joking about it helped me live with the idea that we would never be more than just friends. My failed kiss attempt in the school parking lot seemed likely to end our relationship, but it didn’t. Instead, I’d tackled the awkwardness head-on. I’d reached out to her, apologized, and made light of it. Taylor was cool with that.
I took off my red hunting jacket and walked down the hallway to the living room. I laid my jacket on the couch and sat on it to avoid dirtying the furniture with my work pants. Taylor sat on the opposite end of the couch and clutched a red velvet pillow to her chest. She said her parents had gone to visit some friends.
“How are your classes going?” I asked. “Do you think college is tough?”
“It’s harder than high school, but so far I’m doing well,” she said with a shrug. “How’d the volunteer work go?”
“Great,” I said. “We insulated three homes.”
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“What?” I asked. “The work?”
“No,” she said. “I mean helping people without expecting anything in return.”
It did and it didn’t. After I decided to stay in Kusko, I resolved to make the most of my downtime by doing positive things. My dad’s speech about taking responsibility had inspired me. I wanted to make him proud and give my mom a reason to smile, wherever she was. And I wanted to prove I could handle the situation I’d created by making some good out of it. So far, I’d painted a few rooms inside Nicolai’s church, and twice bagged up groceries for families at the Kusko food shelf.
But even after all of that, Kusko still kind of sucked. Doing the “right thing” was hard work. In my off time, I’d have preferred reading, napping, mushing, or beating Finn’s ass in Madden football. I still couldn’t wait to move back to Anchorage, but I’d decided to stick it out for my full year. Until it was over, I was just going through the motions, regretting the day I handed Yute Cargo most of my marijuana earnings for that stupid two-thousand dollar nonrefundable deposit.
“Yeah, I guess it feels good,” I said. “Last week, when I handed a bag of groceries to a poor old man, he gave me a hug.”
“That’s what it’s all about,” Taylor said, getting up. She walked to the kitchen. “Want to bake cookies?”
“What kind?” I said, rising to my feet. I was starving.
Taylor opened the fridge and pulled out a tube of sugar-cookie dough. She stripped away the wrapping and used a spoon to press down on the tube, popping it open. She opened a drawer beneath the range, grabbed a cookie sheet, and set the oven for three hundred fifty degrees.
“What are you up to tomorrow?” she asked, rolling a wad of dough between her palms.
“I might see what Finn’s doing.”
Taylor never asked about Finn selling weed, but she knew he did. After she and I patched things up in early September, I came clean about my friendship with him. I told her I hadn’t wanted her to know I was friends with Finn because I didn’t want her to think I smoked weed.